


When the Song Stops Playing

by dedougal



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Fluff, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-13
Updated: 2013-03-13
Packaged: 2017-12-05 05:54:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,755
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/719639
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dedougal/pseuds/dedougal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Stiles should not be in a coffee shop this late. He definitely should not be drinking caffeine, especially as it leads to him definitely not be watching Derek Hale play guitar at open mic night.</p>
            </blockquote>





	When the Song Stops Playing

**Author's Note:**

> I was at a concert and had this image of Derek bent over a guitar, intensely strumming some Bruce Springsteen, the music of manpain. This ended up less cracky than that, sadly. It's for DazedRose, for her endless and marvellous encouragement. Thank you sweetie. Talking to you always brightens up my day.

Stiles isn’t supposed to be drinking coffee this late. But it’s summer break and he’s a rebel and it’s more a muffin craving. He can get decaf. Or tea. He could totally be a tea drinker. If he could get over his whole it’s just hot water prejudice. Anyway.

He likes the idea of the indie coffee place at the far end of the main street. The far end, in relation to the police station. Which means his dad isn’t going to see him drinking coffee this late like he’d not supposed to be. It’s a perfect solution.

He hadn’t counted on it being open mic night. Stiles _hates_ open mic nights. It’s the worst combination of untalented jerkwads and badly tuned acoustic guitars. If he wanted to listen to caterwauling, he’d step on Scott’s non-existent wolfy tail or something. In fact, Stiles hesitates outside the door for a long moment before the lure of choc chip or maybe blueberry makes him decide that it’s worth it. Starbucks doesn’t have open mic night but then Starbucks isn’t going to feed his craving this late.

Stiles is halfway to the counter when he realises that there’s something familiar about the figure hunched over his douchey guitar strumming really intently. Something familiar in the voice he’s hearing. Stiles is still maintaining forward momentum towards bakery goodness when he turns to just check and to enable himself to laugh at his suspicions. There’s no way…

That’s when he trips over the chair leg. Spectacularly. Yup, he’s going down and everyone stops to look at him. Even the guitarist. Derek. Derek who is playing at this ridiculous open mic night and is the first and only pair of eyes Stiles meets. Derek looks gratifyingly panicked before his usual flat, dismissive stare takes its place, eyebrows lowering in that special way that means “Stiles, you’re a fucking idiot.”

So apparently the end of school really upped his vulgarity rating. He’s blown right through R and heading straight to NC-17 and that, well, that makes him want to look at Derek even more.

Derek starts playing again, the low hum of chat starts up again and Stiles places his order and then flees, in good order this time. He didn't even notice what song Derek was singing.

 

He isn’t intending to go back the next week. The rules about late night caffeine intake are still technically in place but he’s got a massive gaming session planned over the weekend and needs to start building his tolerance and there are a million excuses but it all boiled down to this: Derek is an incurable fascination, even with all the times Stiles has wanted to kill him. Stiles has actually, seriously, proposed killing a whole mess of people when he thinks back on it and he’s sort of worried about the fact that he’s the one who has to point out the death and permanent thing as a solution to people wanting to kill them to Scott on a regular basis. Whatever. Derek. And the possibility to find out more about Derek.

Stiles might even have looked up the coffee shop website and double checked the time. He could slide in just before it began, grab a seat in the back and hide behind his kindle and pretend to look intellectual to fit right in. It is pretty much a perfect plan except for how he gets his coffee, gets his seat, gets his reader out and then Derek sits right beside him.

“Why are you here, Stiles?” Derek isn’t even bothering to hide his irritation. Or the way his eyes flash red. Apparently trying to hide and subtlety went out with ‘I’m the Alpha now’.

“Coffee. And I like music.” Derek glares at him for a long moment before stomping off to the counter and getting his own beverage of choice. And two muffins. Stiles drools a little. He has enough money for another piece of cake, perhaps, if he doesn’t get a refill and he wondered what those white chocolate and raspberry muffins tasted like but he loved passionfruit cake and… And Derek is coming back to his table. And Derek is sitting down beside him. Again.

Derek eats the first muffin resentfully at Stiles. There’s no other way to describe the intent look, the glaring, the sharp, tearing bites. Stiles knew he was weird for actually finding this reassuring and normal in a whole world of not normal that was Derek Hale and a guitar and open mic night.

In the background, some girl took a seat with a keyboard and tinkled away, working her way through some Sarah Mclachlan and some Adele. And by ‘working her way’, Stiles meant murdered. She was barely in tune, barely making the notes on the piano and, Stiles guessed, everyone was talking over her as some kind of self-defence mechanism. 

They all stopped when Derek settled in behind the microphone, leaving his other muffin unguarded beside Stiles. Stiles thought rather a lot about eating it as Derek tuned up, head down, not looking at anything other than the strings of his guitar. When Derek launched straight into a song Stiles had never heard, Stiles found himself listening closely and forgetting all about the bakery heaven sitting by his elbow.

Derek had a nice voice, soft and a little bit sweet. He mostly kept his eyes focused on the guitar, the mic, but every now and again he looked at the audience. Not so much at the audience. More at Stiles. It made him squirm a little, not entirely in a bad way.

Stiles waited but Derek just walked out after his set. He ate the muffin.

 

Encounter number three wasn’t in the coffee shop. Stiles had wandered into the music shop in the mall, mainly to avoid the disastrous combination of Allison and Lydia and Scott and shopping for clothes. He could man up enough to cope for a few hours but he decided to tap out, revive a little and head back in to give Allison a break in a bit. He’d made up some excuse about buying a present and it wasn’t until he was in front of a rack of tab scores that he realised he hadn’t been lying.

He was flicking through the most inappropriate songs he could image when he felt a tug on the back of his shirt. Derek was frowning at him – nothing new there – but then Derek was also standing beside him and shifting from foot to foot and Derek was in the freaking mall.

“Hey,” Derek said. “You learning?”

“Noooo.” Stiles looked back at his hands. There was a lot of Lady Gaga in his hands. “I was, uh, thinking of getting you a present.” He could feel his cheeks heating up at that. The best thing, which made all potential humiliation and/or maiming worth it, was the sheer shock on Derek’s face. “You more Cher or Gaga?”

That broke the mood. Derek actually let slip a growl before shoving Stiles out of the way and grabbing a score Stiles couldn’t see the name of.

“So, uh, see you around, I guess,” Stiles muttered to Derek’s back as he stalked off. He still bought Poker Face.

 

Stiles was in the booth he thought of as his when Derek slid in next to him later that week.

“We really should stop meeting like this,” Stiles muttered. He’d compromised on the caffeine and was drinking some bizarre chai concoction. It had taken double the amount of sugar he normally took to make it palatable and maybe that was not entirely for the best. He could feel the top of his head threatening to lift off. “People will talk.”

“No one knows you here, Stiles,” Derek said. He slid his second muffin over to Stiles while some girl belted out a fairly decent Weezer cover. Stiles tapped along with his foot – a little manically – under the table. He didn’t startle _too_ much when Derek set his hand on his thigh and held him still. Stiles half expected to feel claws but it was only the extra warm skin of Derek’s hand that burned through his jeans, warming his thigh and working up to his cock.

“So-“ Stiles blurted out, a little too loud. People turned to hush him. “So,” he continued, quieter now. “You should talk.”

“What?” Stiles didn’t need to look at Derek to feel his eyebrows pulling down. Also the hand on his leg tightened which did nothing to stop Stiles’s incipient erection. Fuck.

“You should talk, to the audience. Tell them what obscure indie shit you’re singing.” Stiles stuffed half the muffin into his mouth in sheer self-defence. Derek just tightened his hand a – delicious – fraction more and stood up to take to the stage amid scattered applause.

“Play _Freebird_!” Stiles yelled as Derek settled in front of the mic. He kept giggling all the way through Derek’s glare, which merged into something of a forced smile before he began playing. Stiles half paid attention to the song, focused more on the way Derek’s arms flexed under the sleeves of his t-shirt, how his hands basically caressed the strings and he thought about how that hand had been on his legs and no wonder musicians got so much play when they were basically sex on legs and- Derek stopped playing and looked up.

“I had some advice,” he began, before clearing his throat in to the mic and wincing at the resultant feedback. “That I should explain where the songs come from.” Derek looked down at his ready hand before looking up and staring straight at Stiles. “So my sister had a playlist that was exclusively made up of songs called _Run_ or with run in the title. Because every band has basically released a song like that-“ Derek ground to a halt as the crowd let out a low murmur of laughter. “It was a family joke. But this is one of the ones she used to like.”

Derek began playing. This time Stiles didn’t look away – couldn’t look away. Derek voluntarily talking – joking – about Laura. He wanted to, like, use the emergency phone tree (it was a necessary thing) and tell everyone. On the other hand, for all that it was shared with a whole room of strangers, it felt like this moment that belonged to Stiles, and Derek, and, he guessed, Stiles and Derek. Which was a whole new world of mindfuck.

Derek finished up his set and didn’t immediately pack up and stalk out into the night. He slipped back into the seat beside Stiles and finished off the dregs of his cold coffee. His side was warm all along Stiles’s leg and arm. 

The manager of the shop pushed a couple of drinks onto the table while one of the Beanie Brigade (the college kids who seemed to run the open mic night) started clearing up the stage area. “So, how do you know Derek then?”

“You know Derek?” Stiles asked in return. He reckoned the woman must be around the same age as Derek. She had hair dyed the kind of brick red that only came from serious bottles and a clashing ruby stud in her nose. She carried it off well enough.

“School. We were in band together.” She threw an unreadable look at Derek. “Nice to have him back in town.”

Derek shrugged. Stiles knew this because Derek was so close he could feel it – Derek’s slow rise and fall. His leg started to jitter again and, again, Derek’s hand came to rest on Stiles’s thigh. 

“How do I know you, Derek?” Stiles asked, a little desperate. His mind had kind of blanked. He couldn’t exactly say supernatural creature of the night (wasn’t that vampires anyway?) and ‘I was totally going to cut off his arm this one time’ wouldn’t really go down well either.

“We’re friends, Stiles.” Derek ground the words out through his teeth. Alternative indie coffee shop manager looked between them. 

“Enjoy the coffee. And keep going with the talking. It suits you.” She slid out of the booth, going to torment some hapless minion or something no doubt.

“She talked me into this,” Derek said. Then he swallowed the hot drink, not even having the grace to wince at the heat. Derek was out of the door before Stiles could even compose a reply.

He also hoped that Poker Face was still tucked under the wiper of the Camaro.

 

Derek opened with the Lady Gaga. It was hot. Stiles jerked off in his bedroom afterwards and it was Derek he imagined: Derek’s hands, Derek’s mouth, Derek’s abs. He had to fill in a lot of missing details but his imagination rose magnificently to the challenge.

 

“So, you and Derek.” Stiles was early to open mic night and he was all too aware that school was only a few more weeks away and that he probably wouldn’t cope with this, what with the homework on top of the almost certain life and death situations he was sure to run into. The supernatural nasties/werewolf crap seemed to have basically gone to ground for the vacation and that was awesome except for the whole time management/workload/threat of his spine being pulled out problem.

The manager took one look at his open mouth and sat down. “I thought for sure…”

“No, no. No. He doesn’t- He’s not- Not for me-“ Stiles waved his hands about, spilled his iced tea over himself and the table and the seat and just gave up.

“This is kinda high school, but you know he likes you?” She handed over a pile of serviettes and returned with a cloth from behind the counter as Stiles freaked out.

“Well, yeah. We’re friends.” Friends who threaten to rip out each other’s throats with our teeth and tell our dad are raving mass murderers. And so on. 

Then Derek was there, guitar case in one hand and a clean t-shirt in the other. “Go get changed, Stiles.” Stiles looked between the t-shirt, Derek’s face and the wet stain on the front of his own shirt.

And that would be why he ended up in Derek’s t-shirt in front of his dad who was frowning down at him as Stiles tried to burrow down under the seat. Never mind the fact his dad held a bag of cookies that were definitely not on the approved list.

His dad slid into the seat opposite as Derek started playing. Normally, at this point, Stiles would have his eyes fixed on Derek’s face and body and general personage. But he couldn’t look away from his dad.

“The kid’s good,” his dad remarked, as dry as bone.

“He’s-“ Stiles didn’t know what to say. “Yeah, he is.”

“And I’m glad you support your…friend.” There was a definite pause. A hesitation. A meaningful gap that his dad was filling with lots of other words. Stiles let his head fall forward onto the table. “No more caffeine, Stiles. We’ve talked about this.”

“Yeah.” Stiles resigned himself to never getting away with anything ever again for as long as he remained in Beacon Hills.

His dad got up, taking the cookies and ignoring Stiles’s protesting grump. “Say hi to Derek. And he should come to dinner. It’d be nice to be introduced formally.”

 

Derek was leaning against the jeep when Stiles came out of the house the next morning. “Dinner?”

“It’s, like, noon,” Stiles answered before he realised what Derek was referring to. “Ummm. I think he thinks we’re, like, dating. Which is ridiculous and stupid and-” Derek placed a firm hand over Stiles’s mouth.

“Want to grab lunch?” Derek asked, oddly calm. Stiles wondered when the other shoe was going to drop. He was never, ever this lucky. There had to be a threat, an ulterior motive. “Stiles, I don’t play Lady Gaga for just anyone.”

It took a moment after Derek removed his hand for Stiles’s brain to kick back into gear. Did he hear that right? He knew his mouth was just hanging open, catching flies or whatever. “Yes,” he finally managed. “Also. I would totally put out on a first date.”

“I count you almost cutting off my arm as our first date,” Derek replied, sliding into the passenger seat and waiting for Stiles to start the engine. “I’m also counting the death threats as foreplay.” Derek was grinning that toothy, arrogant, fucking evil and hot smile.

“So – take-out?” Stiles started the engine.


End file.
